Thu Dec 27 05:03:15 PST 2018

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Site Maps
It is also a good idea to have a site map linked to from the home page that links to
all major internal pages. The idea is to give search engine spiders another route
through your site and to give users a basic way to flow through your site if your
navigation is broken or confusing. You can also use the sitemap to channel link
authority and promote seasonal specials. The site map should be:
? Quick loading
? Light on graphics
? Overly simplistic
I usually title my site map ?site map.? Sometimes, when people optimize their site
map, it lists above the other pages in their site since it has so many descriptive
words on it. The site map is not the ideal entry place into a website.
Once again, Xenu Link Sleuth checks for broken links and can also help you
quickly build a site map.
Site Maps (Part 2

The original definition of sitemaps was a way for both users and search engines to
be able to find content on your site. Near the end of 2006, search engines also
created an xml based sitemap protocol that could be used to help alert search
engines to new content on your site and the relative importance of each page.
However, it is important to note that actively linking within your main site structure
and building inbound linkage data will carry far more weight in helping engines find
and rank your content. If a file is listed in an XML sitemap, but is not integrated
into the site?s link structure it is hard for search engines to determine how
important the page is.
Pagination
This is not something most webmasters need to worry about, but some large
catalog sites organize items by genre and then list choices alphabetically. If you
have a vast number of related choices and are creating a navigation route that is
more likely to be useful to bots than humans, you may want to link to all of the
choices on one page or provide links to each of the additional pages near the
bottom of the first page.
If you only have one ?next link? on each page, then each time a spider indexes a
page, you are sending them to a page with less and less link popularity. This may
not be a big deal if you have other paths for spiders to search through your site, but
if this is a primary indexing mechanism, you cannot expect them to spider through
25 consecutive pages of items starting with the letter ?S? if they only get one of
those links at a time until they index the next page.